It is desirable to communicate messages originally sent to a host computer to a designated device and allow a user to send a response message from the designated device. The designated device may be a laptop computer, desktop computer, a personal digital assistant or any other type of electronic communications appliance, e.g., cellular telephone, pager or wearable computer device. Such systems allow the user to receive and send messages regardless of whether the user is near the host computer.
Present systems and methods allow a host computer to replicate information to a user's mobile device by storing the information at the host computer and “synchronizing” the host computer and the mobile device. In these systems and methods the mobile device is typically placed in an interface cradle that that is electrically connected to the host computer. The connection may be a local, dedicated communication, such as a serial cable or an infrared or other type of wireless link. The host computer transmits the information for storage in the memory of the mobile device. These types of systems only maintain the same data items after a user-initiated command sequence that causes the mobile device to download the information from the host device.
Another system and method that allows the transfer of communication between a host computer and a mobile device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,694 to Lazaridis et al. The Lazaridis '694 patent describes a system and method in which a redirector program operating at the host system enables the user to redirect certain user-selected data items from the host computer to the user's mobile device upon detecting that a triggering event has occurred. Once an event has triggered redirection of the user data, the host computer then repackages these items. When the user replies to the message, software operating at the mobile device adds an outer envelope to the response message to cause the message to be routed first to the user's host computer, which then removes the outer envelope and redirects the message to the final destination.